Building a Simple Alexa Trivia Skill

Given my background in linguistics, I was very excited to interact with Amazon’s voice service personified in Alexa. She is the product of Amazon’s endeavor to create a solution for users similar to Google voice and Apple’s Siri. Paired with the Amazon Echo, the Amazon Tap, or the Amazon Dot, among others, Alexa is able to perform tasks such as providing the weather forecast, setting an alarm, or playing music. Most of you might recall Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial for the Amazon Echo with Missy Elliot, Alec Baldwin and former Miami Dolphins quarterback, Dan Marino.

Thanks to an open platform where skills can be submitted by third parties, Alexa’s skills are constantly increasing. It was exciting for me to be a small part of that. Amazon has a wonderful tutorial on Udemy for developers. They also have well documented resources to help get you started.

In the tutorial to build a skill under an hour, honestly what took me the longest was seeding the data with my own multiple choice questions. Actually implementing the code was quite simple. You will have to sign up for both an Amazon Web Service (AWS) account and an Amazon developer account if you don’t have one already. But don’t worry if you are going to try this yourself, Amazon is very good to take you through everything step by step, until you are ready to submit your own custom skill.

What did I choose to create a trivia game about? Languages of course! Go check out my skill “World Language Trivia” and see how much you know about the world’s languages!